Is Charlie Crist doomed? And what are newspapers doing?
09/26/2010
No-Party Gov. Charlie Crist appears to be in deep trouble in the race to decide who will be Florida's next U.S. Senator.
Crowley Political Report is highly skeptical of any polling in this volatile and unpredictable election year. But we can note trends and it appears that whether Crist is drawing lines in sand or scrambling the alphabet not enough voters are buying it.
The latest Mason-Dixon poll has Republican Marco Rubio at 40 percent with Crist trailing at 28 percent. Democratic Congressman Kendrick Meek is at 23 percent.
Interestingly, both Rubio (2 points) and Meek (5 points) gained ground in the poll while Crist dropped five points.
The poll of 625 likely voters was conducted from Sept. 20-22 and has a margin-of-error of plus/minus four percentage points.
A final note - newspapers in particular are found of holding their most important poll finding for the Sunday. That's all well and good but as we get closer to the election voter preferences can change in a day which is one reason campaigns do daily tracking polls (which have their own problems).
These Mason-Dixon numbers are four to six days old based on a start date of Sept. 20 and end date of Sept. 22.
Between the time this poll was completed and newspapers got around to reporting it, Crist has been on the air with a new ad attacking both Rubio and Meek, Florida's gay adoption ban has been halted and Vice President Joe Biden campaigned for Meek.
All of these events can affect voter thinking. Newspapers do their readers a disservice by holding the Mason-Dixon results rather than reporting them as soon as they are available.
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